Georgia Counties Face Wednesday Night Deadline To Hand Count Ballots
Gabe Sterling with the secretary of state’s office says the audit process should help give voters confidence in the original count from the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Emil Moffatt / WABE
Counties across Georgia are likely to be working through the weekend on a statewide audit of this month’s presidential race.
All 4.9 million ballots must be counted by hand by Wednesday at 11:59 p.m.
Gabriel Sterling from the Secretary of State’s office says the human error involved in a hand count will make it less reliable than the machine count. But he says it will be close enough to give doubtful voters the confidence that the results of the election were tabulated correctly the first time.
“That is the rationale, that is the reason we’ve chosen to do this audit in this time in this way,” said Sterling. “This will be the largest hand re-tallying by an audit in the history of the United States.”
President-elect Joe Biden currently has a 14,000 vote advantage over President Donald Trump in the presidential race in Georgia.
The Secretary of State’s office says it doesn’t expect the audit to change the outcome of the race, nor has it seen any evidence of widespread voter fraud in Georgia.
Sterling says the state will release updates on the number of ballots counted as the audit goes along, but will not release new vote counts until everything is finished.
He says smaller Georgia counties should not have an issue working through their ballots. He also says larger counties, which have hundreds of thousands of ballots to count, have the advantage of more resources.
“We’ve brought in a logistics firm to help some of these medium-size counties that have a decent amount of ballots and a decent amount of resources to make sure there’s an ability to do that,” said Sterling.
Sterling says the state is exploring using some of its federal HAVA (Help America Vote Act) dollars to help offset some of the counties cost of conducting the audit.
DeKalb Certifies Big Biden Win
Biden’s nearly 250,000 vote win in DeKalb County was certified by that county’s board of elections on Thursday, becoming only the second major metro Atlanta county to certify.
The boards of election in Fulton and Cobb are set to meet certify on Friday, the last day they’re allowed to do so. Then counties will start the process of the statewide audit.
“We have about 373,000 ballots that need to be hand counted between now and the deadline that the state has given us,” said Erica Hamilton, elections director in DeKalb County. Hamilton says the county plans to begin hand counting for the audit on Saturday morning at 7 a.m.
She says about 150 workers will be counting ballots at a time and there will be others on standby.
The county is using one of its large early voting sites to allow workers to social distance.
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